Quote from: dwdollar on July 09, 2010, 4:55:52 AM UTCI think the bigger problem, as others mentioned, is shadow interests buying/selling to create speculative bubbles and subsequent crashes. They could orchestrate these events at critical times (during a version release or media event) to discourage new users. Shadow interests will have enormous funds and won’t be concerned with making a profit.
Even if they could corner the market, it wouldn’t do them any good. The same goes for buying and destroying. Both would cause massive deflation and an ever higher price.
I would be more worried about these shadow interests developing a rival chain rather than them giving away free money for bitcoins… the second option makes bitcoin users richer, whereas the first one could invalidate the whole value of their coins.
If someone were to try to take over the bitcoin network by developing a rival chain they would have to have a lot of money to throw away. My analysis follows:
My computer cost - $700 My computer hash rate - 750 khash/s My computer avg time to generate block - 3 days
Whole network blocks generated in 3 days - 2200 Whole network CPU power estimate - 2200*750 = 1.65 billion hash/s Cost estimate for network takeover - 1.54 million $USD
Estimated Value of whole bitcoin economy at highest exchange rates - $53,640
The only thing I wonder about is what it would cost to rent a botnet to do this for me without actually buying all these computers.
Anyone have an idea?